Lady Godiva was a real historical figure, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who lived and died sometime during the second half of the eleventh century, a genuine Anglo-Saxon noblewoman whose actual documented life has since been almost entirely overshadowed by the legend built around her name. That legend, first recorded well over a century after her own death, holds that she pleaded repeatedly with her husband to ease the heavy tax burden he had placed on the ordinary people of Coventry, and that he eventually agreed, though only half seriously, on the condition that she ride naked through the town's own streets on horseback.
She did exactly that, having first asked the townspeople to shut their windows and remain indoors out of basic respect for her, and her own long hair is generally said in the retelling to have covered her modesty as she made her famous ride through the silent streets.
The character of Peeping Tom, the single resident who could not resist the temptation to look despite everyone else's agreement, does not actually appear in the story until the seventeenth century, several hundred years after the earliest surviving Godiva accounts, and most historians therefore treat him as a later addition rather than as any part of the genuinely original tale. Tradition holds he was struck blind as direct punishment for his transgression. A wooden effigy long displayed in the city and now kept in the Cathedral Lanes shopping centre, originally salvaged from a dissolved abbey and put up as something of a local joke, became identified with Peeping Tom over the years and is still shown to visitors under that name today. Godiva herself is commemorated with a statue in Broadgate and an annual pageant celebrating her story, making this less a conventional ghost story than the city's own founding piece of folklore, one that continues to be repeated and actively re-enacted rather than simply told and forgotten.
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